Highlights on Ora et Labora

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:31:45 -0500

Musk’s Twitter/X is not an aggregator for news. It’s a walled garden. But the type of garden where you need to keep your eyes open and your hand on your wallet. Sometimes it’s fun to visit a seedy neighborhood. But let’s not pretend it isn’t a seedy neighborhood just because, long ago, it used to be nice.

Wed, 20 May 2026 14:44:15 -0500

Jon Greenaway:

Fallon is the court jester of the Anthropocene, a figure who invites us to watch celebrities play parlor games on stage while the air outside the studio begins to smell of tear gas and smoke. In Fallon’s sterile loop of viral repetition comes the final victory of the commodity over human beings—a world where even our laughter is outsourced to the demands of the algorithm. You don’t even need jokes anymore. All you need is to say something that sounds like it could be a joke, and the hollow laughter will come.

The true loss with Colbert being forced off the air after this week is the sincerity that comes with his show and can’t really be found anywhere else. Colbert has the ability to ask the question and know when to let his guests speak, last night he asked Steven Spielberg about how he’s changed as a director and the answer was something you really won’t find on the other shows. As for the rest, Kimmel is fine, Seth always seems kind of uncertain, and Fallon, well, he’s just deeply unfunny to the point it makes me uncomfortable.

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:13:00 -0500

Rebecca Solnit:"[…]In education, the ultimate product is not your term paper or essay or grade point average; it’s your self. You are supposed to emerge more informed, more capable of critical thinking, more competent in your field of study. The students who begin by cheating their professors end by cheating themselves."

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 13:57:00 -0500

Eric Harvey: “Learning about reggae, or even Bob Marley himself, by listening to Legend is like learning about a big city by sticking to its downtown. You’ll no doubt have a good time amid the most publicly accessible art and cultural opportunities that require little work to access, but your trip won’t nearly represent the broader cultures and hidden treasures that take years or decades to fully understand.”

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 14:22:00 -0500

Jess Love: “Nothing is ever simple. Nostalgia protects and nostalgia poisons, and still we go back for more.”

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 09:53:13 -0500

Alys Fowler: “For that is the thing about bogs: they are not hugely interested in wowing you. The mountains have good views and the forest has majesty; the sand dunes sculpture and the wildflower meadow an easy romance. But the bog is quite happy to be passed over – it will share its best secrets only with those who carefully tiptoe in and are patient enough to wait a while to see what comes out once they have settled down.”

Wed, 28 May 2025 10:34:31 -0500

Not one to normally quote anything Black Rock is involved in but an exception here:

“We have more and more conviction that we need people who majored in history or English, in things that have nothing to do with finance or technology,” Goldstein said. “It’s that diversity of thinking and diversity of people and diversity of looking at different ways to solve problems, that really fuels innovation.”

Wed, 14 May 2025 15:59:31 -0500

New York Times:

“Did you see the notes he put on Canvas?” she wrote, referring to the university’s software platform for hosting course materials. “He made it with ChatGPT.”

“OMG Stop,” the classmate responded. “What the hell?”

Ms. Stapleton decided to do some digging. She reviewed her professor’s slide presentations and discovered other telltale signs of A.I.: distorted text, photos of office workers with extraneous body parts and egregious misspellings.

I’ve used AI two meaningful times:

To remember the name and director of House of the Devil. It hallucinated multiple movies before producing the correct answer.
To quickly build an excel formula to drop the lowest three values. It overheated my laptop cause it was wrong.

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 18:50:24 -0500

52% of Gen Zers said schools should be required to teach students how to leverage AI.

49% said they believe AI will harm their critical thinking skills.

41% said AI makes them anxious, while 36% said it makes them excited.

Gen Z is still anxiously using AI: Poll

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 18:39:08 -0500

The Gen Z lifestyle subsidy isn’t entirely like its Millennial predecessor. Uber was appealing because using an app to instantly summon a car is much easier than chasing down a cab. Ride-hailing apps were destructive for the taxi business, but for most users, they were just convenient. Today’s chatbots also sell convenience by expediting essay writing and meal planning, but the technology’s impact could be even more destabilizing. College students currently signing up for free ChatGPT Plus ahead of finals season might be taking exams intended to prepare them for jobs that the very same AI companies suggest will soon evaporate.

The Gen Z Lifestyle Subsidy

Sat, 19 Apr 2025 23:09:00 -0500

“We didn’t use to have to decide if our students were human, they were all people. But now there’s this skepticism because a growing number of the people we’re teaching are not real. We’re having to have these conversations with students, like, ‘Are you real? Is your work real?’” Maag said. “It’s really complicated, the relationship between the teacher and the student in almost like a fundamental way.”

As ‘Bot’ Students Continue to Flood In, Community Colleges Struggle to Respond

Sat, 05 Apr 2025 13:45:44 -0500

On TikTok and YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, paranoia circulates freely because it seems easier to indulge in a smaller, more private version of reality with fellow travelers than to come to a shared consensus on why everyday life feels so awful. There is a banal truth in what conspiracy theories offer to their adherents on these platforms: They arise from the powerlessness to enact change in life on a collective or individual level, and what emerges, then, is a feverish hunt for explanations.

T.M. Brown

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 13:32:02 -0500

A predictable result when using the new AI reality:

Perhaps the biggest takeaway, however, was that prolonged usage seemed to exacerbate problematic use across the board

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 22:15:49 -0500

As large corporations and algorithms tighten their grip to a clenched fist, I think we’re long past due for a second DIY Media Renaissance. But in order for that to happen, we first need to change our habits and expectations around media consumption—starting with deprogramming this idea that media is something that should be unlimited and available at all times through a digital faucet.

“The Digital Patrack Manifesto”

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 21:28:00 -0500

The New Rasputins - The Atlantic

Other civilizations have experienced moments like this one. As their empire began to decline in the 16th century, the Venetians began turning to magic and looking for fast ways to get rich. Mysticism and occultism spread rapidly in the dying days of the Russian empire. Peasant sects promoted exotic beliefs and practices, including anti-materialism, self-flagellation, and self-castration. Aristocrats in Moscow and St. Petersburg turned to theosophy, a mishmash of world religions whose Russian-born inventor, Helena Blavatsky, brought her Hindu-Buddhist-Christian-Neoplatonic creed to the United States. The same feverish, emotional atmosphere that produced these movements eventually propelled Rasputin, a peasant holy man who claimed that he had magical healing powers, into the imperial palace. After convincing Empress Alexandra that he could cure her son’s hemophilia, he eventually became a political adviser to the czar.

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:18:00 -0500

Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier granted clemency by President Biden | MPR News

“Tribal Nations, Nobel Peace laureates, former law enforcement officials (including the former U.S. Attorney whose office oversaw Mr. Peltier’s prosecution and appeal), dozens of lawmakers, and human rights organizations strongly support granting Mr. Peltier clemency, citing his advanced age, illnesses, his close ties to and leadership in the Native American community, and the substantial length of time he has already spent in prison.”